sin the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Southern District
of Mississippi.
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Franklin Buildings, Sixth Street below Arch, Philadelphia.
PUBLISHER’S PREFACE.
This is a legitimate topic of general interest, and it assumes a preponderating importance to the people of the Southern American States, when the fact is taken into consideration that a general league against the institution of African slavery has been entered into and consummated between most of the civilized nations of the earth, and public opinion in many of the sister States of our own National Union has taken the same direction. The result is, to have arraigned the slaveholding States before the mighty bar of public opinion, on the charge of holding, as property, more than ten hundred millions of dollars’ worth of what does not belong to them, which is and never can be the property of man; and this charge embraces, within its scope, the crimes of theft, robbery, rapine, and cruelty.
The time has come when the South must enter her plea of defence, not because the accusers are foreign nations, of which it may justly be said, before their charges are entertained, “Physician, heal thyself,” but because our accusers are among our own brethren, bound to us by freedom’s holiest associations and religion’s most sacred ties.
The author of the “Studies on Slavery” has the double advantage of a full comprehension of the subject both in its Northern and Southern aspect. Born and educated in the former, and qualified by a long residence in the latter section of our Union, he is amply qualified to weigh the prejudices, the teachings, and the arguments of the one, against the facts, the justifications, the religious and political sanctions of the other.
Mr. Fletcher has not only marshalled into his line of impregnable defence the mandates and sanctions of the Sacred Writings concerning the slave institutions, but he has drawn powerful auxiliaries from the sources of ancient history. His exegesis of biblical passages, in the original languages in which they were communicated by inspiration to the world, shows his sound scholarship, as well as his reverence of the literal sense and specific meaning of God’s holy and unimpeachable standard and rule of life and action.